Hello, I am looking for some noob friendly advice on taking an old 1TB hard drive from a prior mythtv build, reformatting, and adding it as storage for /myth. I am certain this has been covered before, but after searching the forums I could not find instructions for a noob like myself.

My plan was to:

1.) Wipe and format to ext3 with gparted 2.) physically install to system and try to find the UUID by running

Code:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid | grep 'sdb1'

3.) Add the following line to fstab

Code:

UUID=(UUID from step 2) /myth auto defaults,noatime,acl,acl,acl 0 1

4.) reboot

Did I miss anything? Do I need to do anything with storage groups? Is there a better way to do this with a script or webmin? should I be using a partition format other than ext3 when I format the drive? should I mount as /myth or /myth2 in fstab?

1) Why use ext3? Ext4 is stable and better.2) Fine.3) Dunno why you have acl in your fstab or why you are echoing it twice.4) You probably want to use rysnc to copy over the contents of your 'old' /myth partition to the new one, no?

Little more backround: I do not want to save anything from the hard drive I plan on adding. It is from an old install of knoppmyth from years ago, I abandoned it during a clean install of linhes, so no need to transfer files. I am keeping my current drive in the system and intend to leave it alone, the purpose here is to simply add storage space to /myth.

As for partitions, mythtv wiki seemed to indicate that ext4 is not as stable, or has not been tested as much as ext3. Also, my current /myth directory is on ext3, and I was not sure if everything would play nice if my myth mounts were mixed between ext3 and ext4, but truly, I know nothing, those were just my thoughts.

For fstab, I dont even know what acl is. That is how my current fstab reads for some reason under my current drive, so I thought I would copy it forward.

When you partition your old drive, you will nuke any info therein. You will make one large partition and format it to ext4. The info on the mythwiki is either dated or just wrong. Ext4 has been considered stable since kernel 2.6.28 back in Oct of 2008. It was introduced and banged on for a full 2 years before that back in the 2.6.19 release. I can assure you, it is stable.

I misunderstood your intentions -- you wish to keep the sum of the current /myth and the new drive as your "/myth"? If this is the case, you do not need to do the rsync step I advised. That was only to copy your current /myth to the new HDD. For what you want to do, I believe storage groups are the best option. I am not an expert with them so someone else or your google skills can teach you how to setup them.

I have no idea what those options in your fstab do; I have never heard of them. Perhaps they are added via the LH installer? I do not know.

Thanks graysky, we forum users appreciate you helping out, which is pretty cool considering you have moved away from Linhes. I am going to play around tonight and report back, I will also try to mount my existing filesystem as ext4 per your comments.

I would not be converting the filesystem to ext4, just mounting per the wiki. Some other articles seemed to say this would work as well, although now you have me thinking twice, maybe it would work for arch, but could be a bad idea for Linhes.

The 3rd field of the fstab lines tells the system what type of filesystem is on the partition in question. If you "Wipe and format to ext3 with gparted" then that field should read ext3. If you go with ext4 as graysky suggests (and he is correct, ext4 is very stable, I myself have been using it for a number of years without incident) then that field should be set to ext4. It has to match the filesystem type on the partition, it should end up like this

Code:

UUID=<Your UUID> /<Your mountpoint> ext4 defaults 0 2

.

Now, more to graysky's point: You can't simply "add" space to /myth with another partition. You can either A) Replace /myth with the 1TB partition (is /myth a separate partition in LinHES? Not using it myself) or B) Mount the 1TB partition into another directory, let's call it /myth2, then add /myth2 to your storage group definition. Option B results in your storage group having the combined space of /myth and /myth2, option A would require you transfer your current /myth contents to the 1TB partition, then mount it into /myth. If you mount the 1TB partition into /myth without first transferring the current contents you won't see anything in /myth (don't worry, it won't be gone, unmount the 1TB partition and it's back. /myth in this context is just a mount point).

So, the real question here is what do you currently have in /myth and what specifically do you want to accomplish? I personally have never used storage groups so I don't know if they apply to all media (Live/Recorded TV, Music, Videos, etc.), you'll have to research what they will do for you and decide the best route for your plans. I seem to recall at some point it did not play well with Videos, that may have been corrected or a misunderstanding on my part.

Now, more to graysky's point: You can't simply "add" space to /myth with another partition.

And to further clarify, as I didn't intend to step on graysky's (or anyone else's) toes in this post, technically you can add space to an existing partition with another, but that requires an LVM or RAID setup which I didn't consider pertinent given the original question.

No toe stepping... just wanted to make sure you don't hurt your existing filesystem, but I'm 99 % sure that the system wouldn't let you hurt it with an invalid entry in the fstab... anyway, sound like you have the answers you need. As an aside, if you do want to convert your ext3 partitions to ext4, here is a guide to allow it:

Ok, just wanted to share my experience in adding more storage space via a new hard drive. I was planning on following the guide posted here:http://fourthlaw.com/mythtv-storage-gro ... rd-drives/I formatted the drive to ext3 using gparted, rebooted, got the UUID, updated fstab, and rebooted. After reboot, I was planning on creating new directories to mount the new drive, and to setup new storage group directories for the new drive. However, upon reboot, Linhes gave me a nice little message right before loading the GUI “New storage device detected, run add_storage.py to add additional space”. I was curious, so I abandoned my original plan and ran

Code:

sudo add_storage.py

This script then did the following:1.) Formatted disc to ext3 (no other choices)2.) Created mount points for the drive and directories for Storage Groups3.) Edited fstab to mount drive on boot4.) Mounted drive5.) Updated Mythtv Storage Groups to point to the newly created storage directoriesAll in all, this script made adding a hard drive dead simple. One of the easiest things I have ever done in myth. For anyone wanting to add more storage, simply plugin the drive, and run the script.Thanks Jams, Cecil, Cesman, and other developers for once again proving that Linhes is the best myth distro ever, especially for noobs like me.

Last edited by tama103 on Thu Jan 24, 2013 3:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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